-The Business Standard The tragedy involving the death of children in a Bihar school should reinforce recent efforts to improve the programme, notes Amarjeet Sinha. The sad loss of 23 innocent lives after consuming hot cooked meals in a school in Bihar has rightly shocked and angered people. The highly poisonous pesticide monocrotophos found in children's food and a headmistress overlooking the cook and the children's protests about the oil and not...

-Outlook Social indices topper Kerala just can't stop the baby deaths in its malnutrition-hit tribal Attapady belt Under the thick canopy of a peepal tree, beside the road that winds to Pallur Ooru in Attapady in the Western Ghats, is a small tribal burial ground. There are no tombstones to mark the graves and on closer look one sees tiny mounds where the mud has been disturbed. In a quiet corner,...

-The Guardian A landmark bill to make the right to food a legal entitlement is mired in controversy over its failure to address a flawed public food distribution system, misplaced priorities and exclusions India has an over abundance of food grains stocked in warehouses, yet millions of India's poor are left without food. Development practitioners and NGOs are in favour of disbanding the current food security system, the public distribution system (PDS),...

-The Telegraph Mathurapur (West Midnapore): Voters of a tiny hamlet in the heart of Jungle Mahal cast aside the fear of Maoists and exercised their franchise today for the first time in seven years. Since 2006, not a single resident of Mathurapur, about 8km from Lalgarh, has voted in any election - Assembly, panchayat or the Lok Sabha - for fear of "retribution" from the Maoists. Mathurapur was then known as the "home...

-The Business Standard Chhattisgarh Food Security Bill was passed on Dec 21, 2012. Under the Act, about 90% of the state's population will have PDS entitlements Raipur: In December 2007, when Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Raman Singh announced no one would die of starvation, not many realised the state was going to create history. The announcement came from the sleepy village of Sonakhan in Mahasamund district, where in 1856, the landlord of the area,...